Funeral for a Dog Review

My short take: this is a very strong first novel, albeit with a few first novel problems. But it’s one of those books good enough and innovative enough to make you want to engage all the way–i.e. to the point that you care about the flaws. (With the majority of books one never gets to the point of caring about the flaws, because why waste time with dull things?)

Also, much praise to translator Ross Benjamin. The book is formally ambitious and grammatically inconsistent. I imagine it must have been tough to translate. There are also two very particular, very distinct narrative voices in this book, and they read very well.

There are two well-worn paths to literary innovation: tell a story that is unlike any other, or tell a very common story, but do it in a way that has never been tried before. Funeral for a Dog, the debut novel by the German author Thomas Pletzinger, does a little of both. Its aspirations to tell a new story are announced in its epigraph, a quote from Max Frisch admonishing those who claim that all possible love stories have already been told. Likewise, the book’s opening pages – a series of fragmentary postcards written just after the plot of the novel ends – immediately declare Pletzinger’s intentions to tell this story in an innovative way.

Much of the fun of Funeral for a Dog is watching Pletzinger attempt to rise to these two challenges, which he does with some success . . .

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Scott, would you mind writing out the Frisch quote? I’ve enjoyed the two works of his I’ve read — have been considering starting Homo Faber — and don’t immediately recall such a line from those, so I’m damned interested.

Also, I don’t know if it is just me, but the links don’t seem to work, and went I went to the National’s site, I couldn’t find the review. Is the online updating simply maybe behind?

“(On love as a relationship between the sexes there is nothing new to report, literature has depicted it in all its variations, once and for all, it is no longer a subject for literature that is worthy of the name–such pronouncements are being made; they fail to recognize that the relation between the sexes changes, that other love stories will take place.)”